Stromatolites
If only my ancestors had been fortunate enough to marry into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize, like all my little green cousins here.
If only my ancestors had been fortunate enough to marry into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize, like all my little green cousins here.
This comic makes fun of claims to 'special' ancestry, such as some old royal family or similar, that may be made after doing research on a family tree site. These services allow the user to input the names and other information of family members and cross reference with various documents to trace lines of descent. Often, those who find a connection to a historically significant individual are quite excited about this and may feel that it somehow makes them special. However, in reality, once you go back more than a few generations there will be many thousands of such connections, and once you get back more than a thousand years or so, anyone you could be related to will also be related to pretty much everybody else still alive in some way or other.
The truly surprising aspect, both normally and (taken to extremes) in this comic, would be to find the necessary records. Ordinary people of the last century, or maybe two, might have reliable records (subject to the effects of errors, accidents and conflict, wherever they might have been). But, beyond a certain point, the information is unlikely to exist to trace back ancestry that was not already considered important enough to record. And even that is possibly subject to wishful (or politically-minded) interpretation to suit the claims of the (at that time) primary descendant of a noted lineage. Even those rare records (which may suggest direct descendency from Adam and Eve; this being simultaneously considered as both incredibly remarkable as a conclusion and not at all surprising, given the premise) tend to lose practically all veracity and primary sources by the time you get that far back in your investigations. Continuous records (or even any usable records at all) are often irretrievably lost, if they ever existed.
Beret Guy tells Cueball he has been on such a site and traced some of his family from "a few billion years back" who were related to stromatolites. These are layered accumulations of mineral "microbial mats" (Cueball calls them bacterial mats) created by microorganisms, predominantly the oxygenic-photosynthetic cyanobacteria. (The comic notably treats "stromatolites" as the name of the bacteria, rather than the rock formation created by the bacteria, seemingly to make the conversation flow better.) Some fossil stromatolites in Australia from 3.48 billion years ago contain the oldest undisputed evidence of life on Earth (though people have also claimed other, older evidence for this record). Since this is some of the first life on Earth it is basically a given that all life that came after (not even just all humans) is related.
Beret Guy only claims he is related to their cousins and that it is from their cousin bacteria that he got his mitochondria. His aside that he also got his cell nuclei in this way is odd, as, according to the leading contemporary theory, the ancestral archaeon ("my archaean ancestors") themselves contributed the nucleus to the original eukaryotic cell. In this model, both the archaeon and the alpha-proteobacterium were endosymbionts in a third cell, which is not consistent with Beret Guy's claim that the mitochondrion began as an archaeon's endosymbiont. Perhaps all that clicking addled even Beret Guy's brain. Anyway, he is not claiming to be a direct descendant from [the cyanobacterial component of] stromatolites, which makes sense since they can photosynthesize, and as he mentions in the title text, he cannot!
Ancestry services typically do not allow the user to track their familial history prior to written records,[citation needed] but with his strange powers it is no wonder that Beret Guy could make this work! (Some do provide genetic sequencing, which allows for more information to be acquired, but this isn't accurate enough to track individual people who lived before such technology existed on a wide scale.) He may also have needed to rely on these powers to do all the clicks needed to go back that far in the past. Even at a rate of 10 to 15 clicks per second it would still take thousands of years — maybe even more due to how fast cells can reproduce — to do enough clicks to work back this far from scratch. However, it may be that a large part of the tree had already been constructed by previous users, and all he had to do was find a relation already attached to this tree. This would further underline how un-special his newly discovered relationship is.
Cueball asks if he would like to contact his distant relatives, since there are still living stromatolites today (or at least something very similar to those from billions of years ago). But Beret Guy imagines they are busy so he will not bother them. When asked by Cueball what he would use his newfound knowledge for, he lies down on the hill they have climbed to bask in the sun. Because as he says, "Lying on a hill in the warm sun is an old family tradition." This is basically the only thing stromatolites can do, but they are doing it all the time and could thus be said to be busy with this. It seems, however, like Beret Guy is going to enjoy this tradition.
In the title text Beret Guy muses about how great it would have been if his distant relatives had married into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize... and then refers to the grass he is now lying on as "my little green cousins here". If this had happened he would either have been able to lie on the hill without eating since he would be able to photosynthesize getting energy directly from the sun (instead of eating some of his small green cousins' closer relatives) - although that might not be enough to sustain him, as per what if? article Green Cows. Or else he would actually have been a plant instead.